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The Inn Album: Browning's Marginal Poem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Walter Kendrick
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Extract

“The said poem is quite finished,” Browning wrote to his publisher, George Smith, on 22 April 1875, “– is on so very modern a subject that it concerns last Whitsuntide – and English country life, – and moreover means to be abundantly passionate and pathetic: I did it with a will in two months exactly: it is some 3,500 lines in length, and, in fact, is a tragedy in a new style. What do you say to this?”

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 11 , Spring 1983 , pp. 113 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

1. Quoted in Ward, Maisie, Robert Browning and His World: Two Robert Brownings? (1861–1889) (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 152.Google Scholar

2. The Spectator, 48 (1875), 1557Google Scholar; rpt. in Litzinger, Boyd and Smalley, Donald, eds., Browning: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), p. 414.Google Scholar

3. The British Quarterly Review, 63 (1876), 236–40Google Scholar; rpt. in Critical Heritage, p. 414.Google Scholar

4. The Nation, 22 (1876)Google Scholar, rpt. in Critical Heritage, p. 415.Google Scholar

5. Browning's Analysis of a Murder: A Case for The Inn Album (Marquette: Northern Michigan University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

6. Quoted in Irvine, William and Honan, Park, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 494.Google Scholar

7. The Inn Album, l. 71Google Scholar. The text of The Inn Album used throughout is that of Pettigrew, John and Collins, Thomas J., eds., Robert Browning: The Poems, Vol. 2 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 333–414Google Scholar. Subsequent line references are given parenthetically.

8. Letter to Knight, Joseph, 28 11 1875Google Scholar, in Lang, Cecil Y., ed., The Swinburne Letters, 6 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–1962), 111, 87.Google Scholar

9. For the details of this fascinating process see Siegchrist, Mark, Rough in Brutal Print: The Legal Sources of Browning's “Red Cotton Night-Cap Country” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

10. See my “Facts and Figures: Browning's Red Cotton Night-Cap Country,” Victorian Poetry, 17 (1979), 343–63.Google Scholar

11. “Thomas Carlyle,” in Essays on Some of the Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith (London: Macmillan, 1887), p. 15.Google Scholar

12. This and other parodies of Browning are reprinted in Zaranka, William, ed., The Brand-X Anthology of Poetry: A Parody Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: Apple-Wood Books, 1981), pp. 196–204.Google Scholar

13. The New York Daily Tribune, 4 12 1875, p. 8Google Scholar; rpt. in Critical Heritage, p. 406.Google Scholar